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Inquisitor Review for PC

Inquisitor Review for PC

Inquire Within

The first thought that will strike you when you boot up Inquisitor: “Holy crap, this looks like it’s ten years old!” Well, first off, you’re wrong. It looks like it’s almost fifteen years old, because Baldur’s Gate came out in 1999, and this is, visually, a refugee from the long-abandoned frontier of the Infinity Engine. No, it’s not actually on said engine, but it looks like it.

That’s okay, though. The visuals are part of this game’s appeal. Besides, you were partly right. While the game looks older, it was actually in development for ten years. But you were wrong again, because there were also three years of translation work put into it to bring it out here; it’s a Czech game, by origin, and was released there in 2009. Thus, it began development the year that Baldur’s Gate came out. And so we’ve come full circle.

Inquisitor Screenshot

My initial foray into Inquisitor was much like my early time spent in Baldur’s Gate. I made a character, assigning his precious attribute points with little regard for how effective this would make him and with the difficulty tuned to normal. The difference between the two is that Baldur’s Gate follows the fairly balanced AD&D rules (well, a variant thereof) while Inquisitor, um, doesn’t. However, while in Baldur’s Gate it was my own damn fault for not reading the manual and learning about what stats affected what in combat; Inquisitor’s manual more or less glosses over it. It’s more flavor text than anything else, and my first two characters were exercises in trial and error. The first taught me how to min-max my combat stats. The second taught me that I should play on Easy regardless.

Trial and error, in fact, describes much of my experience within the game. Talk to people (the game, blessedly, automatically saves any time you talk to someone or something, as well as whenever you undergo a location transition), reload a few times until I haven’t pissed them off, get some pertinent information on my main quests and the myriad sub-quests that feed into that, and go about inquiring vile monsters with the pointy end of my sword and dying a whole bunch. Finding adventuring companions certainly helped and, while combat never really got interesting (click on a foe and wait until it dies, occasionally activate abilities or quaff potions), it became less of a roadblock to progress. This is good, since the game’s writing is superb.

Inquisitor Screenshot

Inquisitor draws upon its real-world namesake, but sets it in a world in which magic and miracles are real things, the end times are upon us, and demons and monsters crawling out of the woodwork en masse. It’s a dark and foreboding place, with malice around every corner and a fine line between the holy and unholy, the two often bleeding into one another. This comes across in almost every conversation you will have, which constantly puts you on edge as you look for the ulterior motives and impure intentions hiding behind every statement even the most pious of individuals makes to you. Suspicion runs rampant and, given that you have the power to accuse and torture suspected heretics in hopes of extracting confessions, it can be a dangerous brand to carry.

It isn’t just the conversation that keeps one on edge, though. Inquisitor isn’t very generous with handing out direction. Nine times out of ten, you’ll receive conflicting information from NPCs on where to go to fulfill quests. Some of the information—in fact, sometimes all of it—will be entirely useless, leaving the player to find their own way by simply exploring. This makes the experience of going into a new, unexplored locale an unsettling one, as you’ll have no idea what’s waiting for you on the other side of that load screen, much less whether or not you’re ready for it. It’s unforgiving, often unfair, and for some reason makes it all the more rewarding when you stumble upon your quest objective in a ramshackle hut out in the middle of nowhere, or when a seemingly random quest from a stranger provides you with an unexpected and vital clue regarding your main quest.

Inquisitor Screenshot

Sometimes, though, this obtuse nature ventures into the territory of being wholly unnecessary and frustrating. While it’s engaging to explore new areas and find your quest objectives (and sometimes entirely new quests) therein, it happens all too often that you’ll have the pieces to solve a puzzle, but no idea what to do with them. Perhaps you’ve found a physical clue that implicates someone in heretical activity, so you take it to the sheriff. No dice. To the inquisitors themselves? Nope. How ’bout the ostracized head of the Paladin order? Again, nothing. You can bring it to the individual it implicates, but once he denies your accusations, or offers an alternative explanation for his activities, there really isn’t much you can do. It feels as though there’s a trigger you’ve missed somewhere along the way, and the game is all too happy to let you wander around in vain until you either stumble upon it or give up.

Inquisitor is also a huge game, easily capable of sucking up dozens, if not tens of dozens, of hours of your time for a single play-through. This is due in part, though, to senseless padding. The first quest a player receives? Kill all of the bats around the first town before you can go inside. It serves as an introduction to combat, yes, and makes you aware of a key spot outside the town you might otherwise miss, but unless you’ve dumped many points into your otherwise nearly useless speed stat, your character plods along at such a pace that making that single circuit can take upwards of thirty minutes, and if you miss any bats, you won’t know until you talk to the guard to try to gain entry, and then you have to go back and do it again.

Inquisitor Screenshot

The most damning, though, was when I found myself unable to progress because every single dungeon had some sort of floor trap in my path. Be they acid, lava, or a bottomless chasm, these patches of terrain are absolutely deadly, especially to your party members who might not take the optimal path across them. The solution to this is the Levitation spell. I looked it up in the manual and found that I lacked the proper magical book, so I purchased it. Then I realized that I needed a higher-than-basic mastery of the associated skill. On top of that, shop inventory is randomized and differs every time you speak to a given shopkeeper, so I searched in vain for the spell scroll itself at the shopkeeper in Hillbrandt’s church (who has a plethora of scrolls for sale at all times). So, just to proceed on with the game, I would have to grind levels to achieve enough mastery of a skill I hadn’t possessed at the start so that I could learn and cast a spell I wasn’t yet able to find for purchase. I had to step away from the game for a while at this point.

Yes, Inquisitor has some hiccups and questionable design choices (such as the audio; you’ll hear the distinctive noises of various monster types whether or not they’re onscreen as long as they’re in the area, and the mooing of the cows and odd, breathless gasps of women one hears in town are oddly out of place). Its age shows, but so does the passion of the individuals who put their time and effort into producing it. The translation is very good, which is beyond impressive with the quantity of text on display. It is not a game that will appeal to everyone, not by a long shot, but for those who think they would enjoy a title that harkens back to an earlier, less cinematic, far less forgiving era of gaming, Inquisitor has plenty of meat to sink your teeth into.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
Though they’re certainly old school, the graphics are part of the game’s appeal, and the sprites are both well-drawn and animated. 3.5 Control
Largely intuitive, the controls do have a nasty habit of activating the wrong thing when you try to click in a cluttered mess of interactive objects and people. Also, you’ll want to remember some of the hotkey party commands, since there’s no mouse-driven party interface. 3.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The music seems almost random, though it’s all of good quality. The sound effects, though, can be grating, particularly when spiders are around. 4.5 Play Value
This game is massive. Unforgiving, but massive. And, given that it doesn’t hold your hand, there’s a tremendous amount that practically must be explored. 3.7 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Wield the power of the Inquisition as you arrest heretics; use a variety of tools such as the iron maiden, suspension, and the rack to extract confessions and burn the heretics!
  • A wide, open-ended world for you to explore and exploit as you see fit.
  • More than 200 weapons, 80 spells, and 7 schools of forbidden and allowed magic!

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